The past couple of weeks have been very busy and chaotic in our family, so I haven’t had time to post anything for quite a while!

Two weekends ago we took our Middle School Youth Group (“Totally Friday”) to Bair Lake Bible Camp in Jones, Michigan for our 2nd annual “Deep Freeze” Winter Retreat. We had a great time! The camp had an ice climbing wall, which was really entertaining to watch. Some of the kids are little climbing monkeys! The adults that tried had a much more difficult time getting to the top…

My Chris is in the black jacket, and the other YP Ryan and his fiance Kryssia are on either sides of Chris.

Sonja, me and Kelly

Of course, the retreat is all about the kids and we spent most of our time following them around and playing/supervising, but this weekend was also really fun for the “grown-ups” because we got to hang out with our friends from college who work with the LEFC middle school group that came with us on the trip. My college roommate and maid-of-honor Kelly (blue coat above) helps with the group, and her now-roommate Kryssia is engaged to Ryan, the youth guy at LEFC. Ryan and Chris have been good friends since freshman year of college, as Chris discipled Ryan and a few other guys throughout college. Now that they’re both working with churches they like to do co-activities, and the kids really love getting together with the other youth group, so it works out for everyone!

Our growing groups!

We took a coach bus that’s been renovated into a “ministry bus” – the rows of chairs have been replaced with facing benches that encourage community/conversation/group games/etc. ALSO (and I think this is so cool) all the benches can be pulled out to lie flat for sleeping, and I assume there’s a way to put up a partition for guys/girls sides. Anyway, the guy who owns the bus drives church groups around for a living. Pretty awesome.

Ok, this is me in my snow cave. The theme of the weekend was “Man vs. Nature” – a take on Discovery’s Man vs. Wild with Bear Grylls. Over the weekend we watched an episode of Bear Grylls in the snowy mountains of Patagonia, and several of the kids were so inspired by Bear’s innovative survival skill of digging a “snow cave” that we spent most of Saturday afternoon digging our own caves! Each kid dug a hole into the side of a huge snow-plowed drift, and after the holes were deep enough to crawl into, we dug tunnels in between each hole so we could slither into each other’s holes. Notice how I include myself in this snow party – I totally dug myself a huge snow cave! The above picture is me popping out long enough to say hello to visitors before climbing back in to continue digging my tunnel that connected to Sonja’s cave. I can’t remember the last time I had so much fun!